In this work, we present the hydrogen production by photolysis, sonolysis and sonophotolysis of water in the presence of newly synthesized solid solutions of rare earth, gallium and indium oxides playing as catalysts. From the experiments of photolysis, we found that the best photocatalyst is the solid solution Y_0.8Ga_0.2InO₃ doped by sulphur atoms. In experiments of sonolysis, we optimized the rate of hydrogen production by changing the amount of water, adding ethanol and tuning the power of our piezoelectric transducer. Finally, we performed sonolysis and sonophotolysis experiments in the presence of S:Y_0.8Ga_0.2InO₃ finding a promising synergistic effect of UV-visible electromagnetic waves and 38 kHz ultrasound waves in producing H₂.

The triplet–triplet annihilation based up-conversion process, involving a platinum octaethyl-porphyrin (PtOEP) as a sensitizer and tetraphenyl-pyrene (TPPy) as an emitter, has been investigated in homogeneous solutions of toluene, bromobenzene and anisole, and oil-in-water microemulsions of the TX-100 surfactant, where toluene constitutes the non-polar phase. In homogeneous solutions, the highest up-conversion quantum yield (of the order of 20%) has been achieved in toluene, being the solvent that has the lowest viscosity among those explored. The up-conversion emission from the PtOEP–TPPy pair has been then investigated in a toluene based oil-in-water microemulsion at three different concentrations of the solutes, showing quantum yields up to the order of 1%, under the same irradiation conditions, but different deoxygenating procedures. The results herein reported might represent a good starting point for a future investigation in microheterogeneous systems. An optimization of the microemulsion composition, in terms of surfactant, co-surfactant and toluene concentrations, could allow us to increase the sensitizer and emitter concentrations and set up the best operative conditions to obtain even higher up-conversion efficiencies.

An efficient continuous synthesis of nanolatex was achieved in water using a single-lane photochemical microreactor combined with an energy-saving and safe UV fluorescent lamp. Acrylate and thiol-ene miniemulsions were polymerized in high yields at low irradiance (3 mW cm⁻²) upon controlling droplet size, temperature and residence time.